Title
page of the first Quarto (Q) published by Thomas Thorpe (TT) in 1609
and printed by G. Eld.

The
bookseller William Aspley had his shop in St. Paul's Churchyard, the
home of many of the booksellers of the time.

The title
page is unusual in that it hyphenates
the name Shakespeare and also because it uses the genitive of the name,
equivalent to 'SHAKESPEARE HIS SONNETS' in the language of the time. Mostly books
of sonnets
were dedicated in the title to a beloved, as for example Sonnets to
Delia,
by Daniel, or Sonnets to the fairest Coelia, by Percy. Or they were
given
an elaborate, often mythological title, such as Sidney's Astrophel and
Stella
or Barnes' Parthenophil and Parthenophe. Title pages of all these works
and others are shown below for comparison. Often the author's name is
absent
or given only as initials. None of them put forward the author's name
with
such defiance and boldness as does this one. And the ascription to
Shakespeare
is repeated at the head of each separate double page spread throughout
the
work. (See the reproductions of Q given on the text
facsimiles page).

The hyphenation of
the name possibly emphasises
the presentation of the work as a defiance of convention, the first
blast
of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of the sonneteering
tradition
which had imprisoned so many poets over the centuries. The writer
brandishes
his spear against this stultifying tradition by writing sonnets to a
man
with whose beauty he is infatuated, and to a woman whom he
simultaneously
lusts after, frequently sleeps with, or wishes that he could do so, and
mostly despises. Nothing could be farther removed from Petrarch's
chaste
sonnets to Laura , or Sidney's to Stella, the idols of whom were both
unaproachable
goddesses who kept their admirers at a safe distance and spoke only to
their
spiritual senses. Here, on the contrary, the poet allows love to
coexist
with and depend on sexuality and he tries to look honestly at the
consequences.
By making us look at this interdependence in a distinctly
non-traditional
(some would even say abnormal or perverted) setting, he forces us to
gaze
deeply at our own pre-conceptions and to examine once again what we
understand
by love. Paradoxically, one of the lasting consequences of this
approach
is the emergence of a realisation that a much deeper spirituality
exists,
a sense that love survives even the most destructive aspects of sexual
passion,
survives even the pillage of beauty and all that makes us human, and
bears
it out even to the edge of doom.

The
tradition that the sonnets were pirated
by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, and never intended by Shakespeare for
publication,
is dependent more on the exigencies of social history than on any known
fact. In the past it was bolstered by the need to prove that
Shakespeare
could not seriously have loved a man, was not tainted by homosexuality
or
eroticism, and by the necessary belief that if he did err, it was in
the
lusty irresponsible days of his youth, before he became a mature
writer.
Even well known homosexuals, such as Auden and Rowse, have promoted
this
view, perhaps with the unconscious (or conscious) intent of covering
their
own tracks, rather than with any malicious objective of distorting
history.

We do not in fact
know what Shakespeare's sexual
orientation was, but there is no doubt that in the Elizabethan world
sodomy
would have been regarded as an almost unspeakable crime. To present a
sonnet
sequence in which five sixths of the poems are passionate declarations
of
the love of an older man for a younger man was, to say the least, a
challenging
and dangerous approach to a description of love. The fact that the
sonnets
were ignored for centuries afterwards, and rarely reprinted, testifies
to
the challenge that they present and the disturbing effect they have had
on the historians of literature.

Additional support
for the view that Thomas Thorpe
had no right to publish the sonnets is derived from the unspoken
tradition
of bardolatry, within which lurks the belief that Shakespeare did not
care
too much about his fame or immortality or posterity. It is presumed
that
he made little or no effort to publish his works, and it is presumed
also
that the survival of many of his plays is only due to the industry of
Heminge
and Condell, the publishers of the first folio, long after the author's
death, rather than to his own foresight or energy.

But there is no
historical support for this belief,
and the only documentary evidence that we have, in the form of his
will,
shows that he was very much concerned with the survival and
bequeathement
of his property even as far as the seventh generation hence. He was not
indifferent to posterity, or indeed to his wealth and fame while he
lived.
Reasons for his failure to publish much in his own lifetime may have
been
that he was too busy, or that he did not consider it to be profitable,
or
that he deferred the final publication of his own works to a date when
he
might have leisure to attend to it. It is extremely unlikely that he
knew
beforehand the date of his own death, and his plans for his own version
of a first folio might well have been intermitted by the drinking bout
which
legend tells us was the cause of his taking off.

The presentation of
this first edition of the sonnets
seems to demand the near presence of the author. Apart from the care
that
has gone into the overall arrangement of the sequence and the placing
of
individual sonnets, the title page emphasises his name, and the page
headings
thereafter repeat it. We may if we wish assume that this was a
marketing
technique employed by Thomas Thorpe, but it is far more likely that it
was
something agreed in advance by author and publisher. What is of
paramount
importance is that the need to consider that this edition might have
been
pirated would never have arisen had the sonnets been of a conventional
type.
It is only the dubious and disturbing nature of the love that is
portrayed
in them that has fostered the belief that Thomas Thorpe was some sort
of
brigand publisher making free with all men's work. In fact, as far as
we
know, he was a respectable man who saw through the press works by
Jonson,
Chapman, Marston and others, and it is quite likely, owing to his
importance
as a publisher of dramatic works, that Shakespeare knew him fairly
well.

It is also argued
that the uncorrected nature of
the Sonnets is proof that Shakespeare had nothing to do with their
publication.
But apart from some obvious errors such as in 146 the text is adequate,
and not inferior to the standard of works of the period. The final
proof
reading may not have been possible owing to it being a bad plague year,
which forced most Londoners who had any income to decamp, and
Shakespeare
probably spent much of the year at Stratford or staying elsewhere with
friends.
He would not have been in London in the summer of that year to oversee
the
publication.

To summarise: Most
publications of sonnets distanced
themselves from living persons either by concealing the author or by
mythologising
the subject. Shakespeare's sonnets differ in being directly and
forcefully
attributed to him, and in having the plain title of 'Sonnets', thus
interposing
no barrier of allegory or fiction between himself and the reader. The
pretence
that he never wished to have them published is based on spurious
considerations
of reputation, both that of Shakespeare and English Literature in
general.
Neither of these considerations apply today, and perhaps for a brief
moment
of history we are freer to look at the sonnets with an untarnished eye
than
any previous generation in history. There is every reason to suppose
that
they are presented as the author intended them to be. Whether or not he
dared or wished to add to his fame by them is a moot point. But their
content
is such that he must have thought as he looked over many of the lines,
that
future generations would look at them with wonder, and that when he and
the beautiful youth were buried in dust, the sonnets would survive as a
worthy monument to his name.

TITLE
PAGES OF WORKS BY OTHER
SONNETEERS ARE GIVEN BELOW FOR COMPARISON.

Sir
Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella

The
Tears of Fancy by Thomas Watson

Sonnets
to Coelia by William Percy

Never befor
imprinted

Not exactly true, since sonnets 138 and 144
had been
printed in The Passionate Pilgrim, an apparently
piratical work published
by Jaggard in 1599. However it seems safe to assume that the remaining
152
sonnets had not been published before.

By G. Eld
for T. T.

George Eld was a
printer whose workshop produced
many of the titles of the day.

Thomas Thorpe (T.T.)
the publisher of the sonnets
made an entry in the Stationer's Register on 20 May 1609:

'Tho. Thorpe.
Entred for his copie under the handes of master
Wilson and master Lownes Wardenes a booke called
Shakespeares sonnettes vjd.'

It is not known
precisely when in 1609 the book
came out.

And
are to be sold by William Apsley.

William
Apsley was a bookseller whose shop was situated
in St. Paul's Churchyard at the sign of 'The Parrot'. Some of the known
copies of the Sonnets were sold by John Wright, whose shop was farther
to
the north at the door of Christchurch nearest to Newgate. (See KDJ
Intro.
p. 37).

Parthenophil
and Parthenophe by Barnabe Barnes.

The lower
part of the title page has been torn
away.

This, and
all the other title pages, are reproduced
from Elizabethan Sonnets, newly arranged
and indexed, with an
introduction by Sidney Lee. Westminster 1904.